Overview

Chances are, you’ve already heard of Mailchimp or have seen their name before on an email in your inbox. Mailchimp’s Forever Free pricing option combined with their cute, memorable branding and out of the box template mechanisms make it one of the most widely-used email marketing solutions available, used by over 300,000 companies. Mailchimp’s free plan includes most of their available features but requires a small Mailchimp ad be displayed at the bottom of your campaigns. Their interface has actually been described by customers as “fun”, which can greatly help with adoption and the learning curve of something as daunting as email marketing.

Who Is Mailchimp Good For?

Mailchimp might be right for you if you are looking for a free starter ESP (Email Service Provider) which allows you to set up correspondence with your customers in an easy-to-use interface. While many large companies also use Mailchimp, common complaints include Mailchimp’s lack of complex automations and uncertainty of delivery to customers. You should consider Mailchimp if your requirements match the following: you want a free service, your customer base is extremely small, your email workflow requirements are very simple, and you want to be able to integrate with common applications. The highlight of using Mailchimp is that it is very easy to put together a quick but beautiful campaign using one of their pre-made templates and customizing it for your needs.

Areas For Improvement

Phone Support It can be very frustrating to have an issue where you just want to speak to someone to explain your issues but instead be pointed to canned articles, which may or may not help you get to a resolution. The closest Mailchimp offers is chat support, but their hours are limited and this only comes with the paid plans. Luckily, their Knowledge Base and videos are very good at helping you figure out what you need, but these don’t always cover everything.

Mobile App While some improvements have happened on this front and the developers at Mailchimp are continually working to improve the mobile app, it is difficult to maneuver and hard to ensure picture sizes are accurate using their mobile version. Take this with a grain of salt, since mobile devices aren’t ideal for designing and writing anyway.

Conditional Automations Mailchimp is not the best choice for those who need complex workflow solutions. The automation works best if you are only doing specific trigger campaigns such as, “send an email after user subscribes welcoming them”. Each automation is completely independent, so you are unable to do logic like, “send this email to subscribers from this list, but only if they met criteria X and didn’t receive email Y from 2 weeks ago already”.

Multiple Campaign Management It is difficult to manage multiple campaigns in Mailchimp.

Workflow Diagram A visual representation in the form of a flowchart would be extremely helpful. Some people have mentioned that other email marketing software like Active Campaign does a much better job at this.

Delivery The jury is still out as to what the actual Mailchimp delivery rate is. Some customers claim that up to half of their emails do not get through to their subscribers, although Mailchimp boasts a 96%-99% delivery rate. Mailchimp does not provide a delivery report to users though so this is hard to confirm from the user side. Most of the problems with delivery are attributed to emails from Mailchimp being flagged as “spam” or having them routed into the less used “Promotions” tab in gmail, as opposed to the regular inbox. There have also been some reported issues with Mailchimp not sending reliably to Outlook users.

Pricing Structure While Mailchimp’s Forever Free plan is unarguably a great deal for what it offers, once you outgrow this and move into a paid plan your options become confusing and seem a bit expensive. They do offer a pay as you go plan but this model is hard to understand. Their unlimited email plan starts at $10.00 a month for up to 500 subscribers and goes up from there based on the subscriber band you are in.

Resend Unopened Emails It is actually possible to do this through Mailchimp, but it’s not as simple as a 1-click option. You have to go through a few steps to identify the emails that didn’t get opened and then flag these for resending.

Helpful Negative & Positive Customer Feedback

Helpful Negative Review

“Being a solo founder, every day I regret using Mailchimp. So often, I’ll try and implement a simple thing and it will prove hugely frustrating to implement.I’m so annoyed at the hours wasted and now that I’m ‘set up’ I don’t want to spend the hours embedding/setting up another tool.So that you can see what I mean and you don’t just think this is me being a complainer, I’ll give an example -You can pick ‘any’ or ‘all’ for filtering based on criteria, e.g. if you want to automate an email to send to all people who have purchased X AND either Y or Z, you simply can’t. You’d have to set up two whole automations for it.This is one quick example of something that’s ridiculous, there’s tonnes more but I’ve got no time to write it since I have to spend the next hour undoing something because of another issue their system has created…Honestly, it might seem like the easiest thing to start with, but this is one time where it massively, massively pays to start out right, otherwise you’ll get embedded in a system you hate, struggling to make it work…”

Helpful Positive Review

“If you ever thought about email marketing, there is hardly any chance you didn’t hear about Mailchimp. It seems to be the go to solution for anybody just starting out with email marketing. What’s great is that even in the completely free version you can send newsletters, send automated emails like order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders etc. with lots of integrations to existing e-commerce software. The interface is very simple to use and its built-in drag and drop editor is very flexible as well with lots of predefined elements to choose from. There is built in Google Analytics integration together with numerous other tools from Facebook to Pipedrive, so you can use your mailing list to create custom audiences on FB or sync them with your preferred CRM version to send mass mailings to your customers. What’s also nice is the agency feature that allows you to manage multiple accounts under one roof. This is especially useful if you have customers with existing Mailchimp accounts that want to invite you to their existing account.”

Free plans have email support for 30 days. After 30 days free plan members only have access to the Knowledge Base for troubleshooting issues. Paid plan members will get email, chat, and Knowledge Base support.

The Scoop

Mailchimp goes out of its way to make your experience fun and to not take itself too serious, and for that, we salute it. We believe fun is highly overlooked in software (or has been) and it’s refreshing to see a company that not only wants its customers to have a good time but is always adding new customer-driven features. As long as you understand what you are getting, which is not an overly-complex marketing tool, you will most likely be satisfied using this. As your company’s needs expand you may find you outgrow this tool at some point – which is a good thing. For a free starter tool it’s a solid choice.

Our conclusion is that MailChimp is a solid mail marketing platform for companies looking to send basic correspondence to its customers. While its lack of complex automations can prove frustrating for some, this will not be an issue for many small businesses who are only looking to reach out to their entire subscriber base with regular updates, often manually. If your business is centered around targeted emails to specific customers on a frequent basis and advanced options such as time-scheduling are required, you should explore other options. We recommend this for beginners looking for a fun and fast way to dive into learning how to do email marketing. There are also excellent integration options available with this choice.

8.8Total Score

Great Beginner Option

Mailchimp is an excellent starter email campaign management program for those on a tight budget with only a few subscribers. It is good for creating simple, out of the box template automations without complicated workflows. The integration possibilities and reporting features are very good and it brings an element of fun to otherwise dull work.